Good video rendering performance. Inexpensive. Can be modified to fit in half-height cases.

Cons

Poor choice for gaming.

Bottom Line

If you only need your video card to drive a home theater PC, Asus' ENGT430 will do the job well. Just don't expect it to excel at much else.

It's taken Nvidia a while to push its new GPU architecture down to all the major price tiers, but now that Fermi has broken the $100 barrier, it looks like the process is more or less complete. The newest addition to Nvidia's line is the GeForce GT 430 chipset, represented in cards like Asus' ENGT430, which comes in at the very bottom of the pricing structure: $79 list. The sub-$100 market is a volatile one right now, and not everyone will need (or want) cards positioned there. As long as you only need basic video processing, for things like Blu-ray, Stereoscopic 3D, and HD streaming, the GT 430 is an attractive value. But if your ambitions stretch much further, particularly into the gaming realm, you'll want to find something else.

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Design & Features
In most ways, the ENGT430 matches Nvidia's specifications for GT 430 models. It's a single-slot PCI Express x16 card, clocked at 700 MHz and loaded with 1GB of 800-MHz DDR3 memory with a 128-bit interface. The card does not require a direct power connection to your computer's power supply, and offers one DVI, one VGA, and one mini HDMI output on its mounting bracket. The card cannot be cooled passively, but it uses a small fan and heat sink that will at least let it run fairly quietly. Nvidia lists the stock GT 430 as measuring 5.7 inches in length, but Asus' card is slightly longer, 6.3 inches. Either way, the GT 430 is designed for use in cramped cases.

Asus' card distinguishes itself in other ways as well, with several features that are intended to increase its durability and usefulness. First, the GPU Guard system adds an additional layer of glue that secures the GPU to the PCB and prevents cracks; Asus claims this increases the resilience of the GPU by nearly two and a half times and more than doubles the rigidity of the PCB. Fuse Protection guards against mishaps due to power surges or short-circuiting by inserting additional fuses before the power even hits the primary GPU current. Asus claims the ENGT430's fan is dust-proof because the interior chamber that contains the bearing has been sealed twice rather than just once; according to Asus, this increases the life span of the fan from 40,000 to 50,000 hours. If you're really serious about putting the ENGT430 in a home theater PC case, Asus makes it easy by including swappable mounting brackets that let you transform the card into one that uses two slots for its output ports rather than just one.

This last change is a particularly smart one, as it makes the most of the GT 430 chipset's inherent potential. It's based on the new GF108 GPU, which is essentially the GF106 (used in Nvidia's most recent release, the $129 GTS 450) cut in half: two Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs) instead of four; 16 texture units instead of 32; two Polymorph Engines instead of four; and, by extension, 96 CUDA processing cores instead of 192.

Performance
If this makes it sound like the GT 430 is not the most robust performer on that market, that is indeed the caseat least with regards to gaming. We threw our entire battery of gaming benchmarks at it and it rarely achieved playable results even at Nvidia's recommended resolution of 1,280 by 1,024. The best it managed was in Mafia II, at the Low (1,280 by 720) video preset, averaging 44.5 frames per second (fps), but that's a DirectX 9 title. DX10 and DX11 tests, whether synthetic or real-world in nature, were very weak: 19 fps for Aliens vs. Predator, 22.8 fps for the typical test of Lost Planet 2 (and an even more dismal 10.5 fps for the DX11 stress test), and just passable DX10 and DX11 scores of 36.9 and 38.9 in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat. Any way you look at it, this isn't even a stellar entry-level gaming card.

Much more heartening, however, was its result of 69 megapixels per second (MPps) in the SiSoftware Sandra video rendering benchmark, surpassing even the 62.32-MPps result of the fastest current-generation sub-$100 video card, the ATI Radeon HD 5670. This shows that GT 430 does possess media prowess beyond its gaming capabilitieswhich, for this card, is a very good thing.

The bad news is that the GeForce GT 430 isn't being released at the best time for Nvidia. With AMD poised to present its next line of video cards, a card this underpowered is not going to help Nvidia leech much excitement from that event. And with both Intel's Sandy Bridge CPUs and AMD's Fusion APUs on the horizon, the call for budget video cards to handle everyday media-manipulation chores is, in all likelihood, rapidly approaching its end. We can still recommend it as a single-use card (though if you have any gaming ambitions whatsoever, the 5670 is a better choice, and only costs $10 more), but if you can wait to see if Sandy Bridge and Fusion (and their video performance) live up to their hype, that might be a better way to go for now. A GT 430based card like the Asus ENGT430 can be a respectable, media-oriented choice, but it's tough to say right now whether youor anyonewill necessarily need it in even just a few months.

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About the Author

Matthew Murray got his humble start leading a technology-sensitive life in elementary school, where he struggled to satisfy his ravenous hunger for computers, computer games, and writing book reports in Integer BASIC. He earned his B.A. in Dramatic Writing at Western Washington University, where he also minored in Web design and German. He has been... See Full Bio

Asus ENGT430

Asus ENGT430

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